


Vol de Nuit

by middlemarch



Category: Foyle's War
Genre: F/M, Memories, Romance, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 05:00:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11223843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Realisation.





	Vol de Nuit

He’d missed the smell of a woman’s perfume and he hadn’t known it until Barbara had taken his arm and there’d been a little eddy of scent, sweet and unfamiliar. Flowers and something else, something slightly sharp, arresting as she was. It had been an unrecognized loss with Rosalind’s death, the little detail that a woman chose for herself, always for herself no matter what she might say or a man want to believe. He’d forgotten that he liked it or he’d made himself forget so that it wouldn’t have to be another grief but the realization was curiously painless, the memory of Rosalind’s treasured bottle of L’Heure Bleue on her dressing table and how she would smile up at him after dabbing it behind her ears. The name meant twilight but he remembered the morning sun giving her dark hair the suggestion of copper, the light on her shoulders where her dressing gown dropped away. Someone else had packed up her things to spare him and when he had come home again after the funeral, the fragrance had gone as well.

Barbara had kept pace with him easily and his silence hadn’t troubled her; he could hear that in her tone when she spoke,

“Penny for them.”

He let himself move closer to her, to breathe her in and try and tell if she had sprayed the scent in her hair, rubbed it on her wrists, stroked the stopper across her throat. He couldn’t answer her, not yet, but perhaps some day she’d ask again and he’d share this with her, hear the smile in her voice when she replied. Not now though, not yet.

“They’re not worth it. Not even a ha’penny.”

**Author's Note:**

> I piggybacked on Kivrin's lovely post on Tumblr which I hope appears here as well. The title is the name of a Guerlain perfume from 1933 (among other things).


End file.
